2023 State of The Word Address Transcript in Markdown

2023_stateoftheword_md.txt

/* This is an easy to read and follow transcript of the 2023 State of The Word Address, which can be found here: https://wordpress.org/news/2022/11/state-of-the-word-2022/
The YouTube video transcripts are hard to follow and read, so I thought I would make it more accessible and create a transcript in Markdown which you can easily copy and paste and reference. 
*/


##Intro
[Speaker Josepha Haden Chomphosy:] 

Hello all WordPressers of the world in New York. (Oh, that was really fast!) Most of the time when I just give people that call, they're like, "Oh, a lady is speaking. what should we do?" 

So here we are. What we're gonna do is we're going to say hello everyone and welcome to this year's State of the Word.

It's so wonderful to have so many of us back here in New York with us today, but also we have a bunch of folks watching from all over the world, all of our satellite watch parties. Hello, thank you so much for tuning in. Any minute now we'll have Matt and that is exactly what we're here to talk about. 

But first, my name is Josepha Haden Chomphosy. I'm the Executive Director of the WordPress project. And as I wrap up my fourth year in that role, I find myself reflecting on the question, "Why WordPress?" 

The most quotable answer to that lies in the phrase free as in speech. But for anyone who's heard me talk about the four freedoms of open source, you know that I think it's a lot more than that. 

The four freedoms of open source are these, in case you have not yet heard me talk about them: 

- The freedom to run the program for any purpose
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so that it does your computing as you wish
- The freedom to redistribute copies so that you can help your neighbor 
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions, giving the community a chance to benefit from those changes. From a practical standpoint, what this means is that you can own a copy of the software that's easy to use, easy to study and learn from, easy to change, easy to share. But, from a philosophical standpoint, as I said, this means a lot
more to me. 

These four freedoms enable the removal of barriers to opportunity in the world. And by continuing to remove those barriers, we secure a free and open and interconnected web for the future. 

The four freedoms form almost a bill of rights for the web. And, as with any rights, you don't need to know that they exist in order for you to benefit from them, or in order for you to deserve them. 

And so when I ask myself, "Why WordPress?" the best answer I have always been able to find is that we secure opportunities and freedoms long into the future, for people who may not even know that those freedoms should matter to them yet. Like so many, I didn't know any of this when I first came to WordPress. 

...We're going to do some WordPress bingo. Who knew that when they first heard of WordPress? (You're welcome, WPSessions folks.) 

But so it wasn't until much later that I met the man that I'm about to introduce to you. And he was one of the many people that taught me that open source is an idea that can change our generation. That man is of course WordPress co-founder, Matt Mullenweg.

[3:03]
## State of The Word Address
[Speaker: Matt Mullenweg]

Thank you. Wow. Welcome everybody. I don't know if you can see on the stream but we have a live studio audience here in New York City, which is pretty fun. I don't know if we're going to be quite as entertaining as SNL, but we'll try. We'll work on a few at least inside WordPress jokes. It's such a pleasure. 

We've got a mix of some local contributors, some folks who have flown in from all over the world. Some WordPress developers and WordPress business leaders. I'm actually curious who thinks they came the furthest, today?

Right over there. Oh, we got Paris, right? That's awesome. Two Paris and a Vienna. So two Paris and a Vienna. Not bad. What's that? And a Berlin. Ah, so Europe is showing up well. Europe's going to feature pretty prominently later, so we got to get some more of that out next time. 

But just a reminder for what we do with the State of the Word. It's kind of an opportunity. 

WordPress is a distributed group, of not just thousands, but actually, probably over 100,000 making up the community. 

You know, we have over 55,000 plugins and themes for WordPress that extended to do almost anything you can imagine. We have all the core developers, the translators. Translated into over 50 languages from volunteers all over the world. 

And as a like massively distributed group that comes together to make this thing that we call WordPress, that has the meanings that Josepha so beautifully spoke about, we also often don't get the opportunity to reflect back on what we've done. And so that's what's so exciting about coming together. It is our collective celebration of what we accomplished.

You know, an almost impossible project of tens of thousands of people, many of whom have never met in person coming together to create something. Almost like a software Amish barn raising. We all come together and make this thing that then is our contribution to the world. Because as Josepha mentioned, WordPress is free and open source. Meaning that anyone can use it. It's accessible. 

We try to be radically accessible, regardless of language spoken, economic ability, technical ability. Everything. We want to create software for the people by the
people. 

It's also been such a roller coaster of a year that it's nice to come back and celebrate some of the fun stuff. So, at last year's State of the Word - I should also say that some of this is a little bit inside baseball.

Meaning that if you're tuning in, and you're kind of learning what WordPress is right now, if it seems like there's a lot of terminology or something, we'll try to define it as we go along. But don't worry. You can Google all this. We're also going to be live-tumbling at wordpress.tumblr.com. 

So if I mentioned a link or something, that'll be up there within like 20 or 30 seconds. So, if you want to check out anything further, double click, as they say, on anything we talked about, check out that wordpress.tumblr.com.

And last year, I spoke a lot about Gutenberg. So I was trying to say how Gutenberg has been adopted even wider than WordPress. So we're best known for WordPress, but Gutenberg, which is our basically new Block Editor, a way to be able to edit, post, and create an entire website using this block paradigm. 

I actually believe it is going to be bigger than WordPress itself, as a contribution and adoption, to the web and to mobile apps. And we have some pretty exciting things that have been going on with Gutenberg all over the world. 

Close to home, you will notice that the bbPress forums that power all the support in WordPress.org now have embedded Gutenberg. So we've gone from - I think it was BBCode before. So if you were to like post a link or an image on the forums before you'd have to write this like strange HTML-like language. 

Now, as you can see it has rich embedding images, videos, oEmbed, everything. So we've really modernized the WordPress.org support experience. And this is using a plugin - I believe it's called Blocks Anywhere? Blocks Everywhere. It's even better than anywhere - which also is going to be embedded in BuddyPress, as well. 

So if you're using the sort of social network in a box that extends WordPress, that's going to have blocks, which is pretty exciting. 

We're also starting to see Gutenberg embedded in completely other applications. So as you notice, this looks a lot like the Gutenberg interface. This is actually a Laravel based application called Engine Awesome. 

And I believe we have the developers of Engine Awesome here? Right there. Congratulations. 

I had trouble summarizing this, but this reminded me a little bit of like Access or FileMaker, kind of a database creator where anyone can create rich forms and data and then interact with it. Is that accurate? Cool.

And leveraging, even though the backend has nothing to do with WordPress, leveraging Gutenberg to make this like really beautiful form builder modifier. 

The Pew Research Center has redone their political typology quiz that they converted the blocks in Gutenberg. Over a million people have completed this quiz. It's kind of a fun one that you can take it out and it sort of categorizes your political typology and then it feeds back the Pew Research information. So I thought this one was pretty fun. 

Please keep these examples coming by the way. I love hearing about these. The award winning journaling app, Day One, which has been App of the Year on Apple's App Store and everything.

Think of it like kind of a private encrypted WordPress - has now adopted Gutenberg for their web version. And will be using native Gutenberg, which is the native iOS and Android implementations of Gutenberg in the future. 

By the way, did we finish the relicensing for the mobile Gutenberg? We did. Awesome. So well, it's one of these things. So Gutenberg, on the web and by default has always been GPL because everything we do is part of this GPL license. 

The GPL license has what's called a viral aspect. So if you embed GPL code in something else, you modify it, you need to give those same freedoms when you redistribute. So your modifications also need to be GPL. 

This works really well on the web. Like you can embed JavaScript, the JavaScript version of Gutenberg in your web application and the rest of your web application doesn't need to be also open sourced. But on mobile apps, because of how they're compiled and distributed, it was sort of kicking in. And so if you prepared an app like Day One or Mailchimp or something like that, you wanted to embed Gutenberg, you couldn't with the way the license was. 

So we actually did a lot of work to go back to all the contributors and all the people who've been part of the code of this mobile Gutenberg, which is again the native implementations of it, and got a dual license. 

So you can use it under the GPL or, I believe, the MPL, the Mozilla Public License, if I'm recalling that correctly, which can be easily embedded in applications. So, as we go through all the Gutenberg stuff, remember that we're not just doing this once, we're actually implementing this three times, in three separate languages, which is pretty fun. And if you haven't checked out Day One, check out that. 

And then finally, I want to show this implementation of Gutenberg because it looks nothing like the others. So this is actually the Tumblr post form, which, and here I'm showing copying and pasting into the Tumblr post form. So if you look at how Tumblr has adapted Gutenberg, it's using all the fun stuff that has been in the Tumblr editor forever. But now it has all the features of Gutenberg there, just 99% of it is hidden. 

As you can see, there's no sidebar, there's none of the other things. It's all inline. So this is a great example of how you can skin Gutenberg to actually get all the benefits of the hard work we've done around copy and paste, rich block editing, editing inside and outside of links. All that is, oops, all of that is happening now. And you can embed anything. 

So I'm hoping to see, you know, we talked a little bit last year about how Drupal is starting to utilize Gutenberg and some other things. I hope that we can create this open block standard that's just the standard for every place there's like a web form. 

Because that means that when a block or a pattern or something is created, that can now be literally cross-platform. And that as users start to learn these interfaces, and like a block-based way of creating rich text or editing sites if they learned it on one system, it'll be applicable in every other. 

So this is again, something I think could be even bigger than WordPress and WordPress has done pretty well. 

Speaking of coming together, like we are right now, we have this pretty fun animation that shows WordPress Meetups throughout the years. So as you can see in the beginning - sort of 2007, 2008 - there's just a couple. They were happening mostly in America. 

As we go through 2010, you start to see WordPress start to spread in America. Europe starts to pop up. You got some London, some - looks like France, Berlin, Portugal. Australia just came online.

Okay, now we're on four, five continents. Africa. South Africa. Looks like some Egypt. So we reached all six continents. 

When I went to Antarctica, I tried to get together a WordPress Meetup but the lack of internet was a little tricky. Now y'all know what's just about to happen. 

So we just hit COVID time. So these red are the in-person meetups switching to the online ones. So there were still a couple that happened. Oops.

Well, I'm just going to describe it. At the end, you started to see the online start to turn back into in-person Meetups. And this was an ingredient that I felt was really missing from the WordPress community the past few years. And we felt it. We've always taken for granted that, since the early days of WordPress, we brought people together in person. At WordCamps or Meetups often low- or no costs, just all over the world. 

And it turns out that was like a really magical ingredient of onboarding people to be new contributors. Teaching them about the WordPress culture. And also getting the influence of folks from all walks of life and all backgrounds coming together and then influencing, mixing with WordPress developers and plugin creators and everything and then influencing the future of it. 

So I'm very proud to say that from 21 to 22, the amount of Meetup groups active has doubled from kind of the nadir that we reached in 2021. We also went from one WordCamp in 2021 to 22 in `22, which is kind of cool. 

Netherlands, Kathmandu, Valencia, Lyon, Bharatpur. I'm going to work on pronouncing some of these. We already have 34 in planning for 2023 and that number could go even higher. So I'm excited to see these WordCamps come back. 

I'm also excited to say that after a six-year hiatus, the WordPress Community Summit is coming back. So this is going to be concurrent with WordCamp US, which this year is in National Harbor, Maryland, USA in August. Sort of the end of August, August 22nd to 23rd. The Community Summit is basically for the top contributors of WordPress to come together and I'm excited to see how that comes up again.

Especially since it's been so long since the last one. And many of the new contributors, some of whom we're talking about today, have never had a chance to meet other folks in person. 

Also a milestone I'm very excited to celebrate next year is that WordPress is turning 20 years old. Not a lot of software projects make it that long, much less are growing faster than ever, at that age. Actually, one that we share our birth year with is Creative Commons. Which is kind of exciting. Also turning 20 next year.

We're going to have a lot of exciting stuff going on with the 20th birthday of WordPress. If you'd like to follow along at wp20.wordpress.net or –– we're going to be having a site that'll have like special edition swag and merchandise. We're doing a new edition of the Milestones book. 

So Milestones is the open source book we did on the first 10 years of WordPress, 2003 to 2013. So we're doing the second 10-year update of that book. And there'll be events all
over the world. So we'll have a chance to have fun. You know, the last - at the 10 year anniversary of WordPress, people made some amazing cakes and there's like all sorts of fun stuff. So I'm excited to see what the kind of community-generated, worldwide celebration of WordPress 20 is going to be.

I talked - I spoke last year about how important education is to the future of WordPress.

We have a site at learn.wordpress.org, which now has open source courses community workshops, things happening almost every week that might be sort of moderated or facilitated by a volunteer. And also the content itself has been created by people all over the world who teach WordPress.

It's being translated in new languages now. We had 12,000 people take one of these courses. Such an important part of getting involved with WordPress is the education. And I love meeting folks, including some like startup founders and CEOs that tell me that they learned to code from doing WordPress themes or WordPress plugins. Which is, it's pretty exciting. It's also how I learned to code. 

So, it's kind of fun to see the ripple effects of folks who might get started with WordPress, might take one of these free online courses and where they end up. We have also gotten around to redesigning some of the pages on WordPress.org. We've got the blog that's been redesigned. And we're trying to do - this is the new showcase just launched yesterday. 

And as you notice we're starting to bring our jazz design language to everything. I hope that this is kind of like our neo-soul, neo-jazz meets software aesthetic is kind of like a new web design language to the world. And of course, we're putting into themes and everything like that. 

So this is going to be kind of fun to get out there. There's so much more of WordPress.org to redesign. But we're taking it one bite at a time. 

It feels like it's one of those giant pizzas–– I just went to Champion Pizza in New York last night, Kind of in the Lafayette area or on Lafayette Street)... And they tried to break the Guinness Records for the longest pizza. And I was like, "How did people eat that?"

That's sometimes how I feel when we're redesigning WordPress.org. There's just a lot to do. We also spoke last year about Openverse which is kind of unusual. This was an acquisition that we did from the Creative Commons organization. But it wasn't really an acquisition, because what we did was we put it on WordPress.org. 

What Openverse is, is essentially a search engine that scours the entire web for Creative Commons licensed media. It could be photos, videos. If you're not familiar with the Creative Commons is, it's kind of open source applied to media or content. So a license which, under this image, can be used for sometimes commercial use, sometimes non-commercial use. Sometimes with attribution, sometimes no attribution. 

It's kind of a variety of different (licenses)- as a creator, you can pick different licenses to put things out there. One thing that we launched was audio. So now if you're doing a podcast or something like that, there's now all this amazing music and audio that creators have chosen to share with the world. 

Much like the developers and designers of WordPress have chosen to share their work with the world under these open licenses. So, so far, in the Openverse, we have over 22 million images, 1.1 million audio files, where it's been used millions and millions of times per month. And in the past 30 days, over 59 million requests. And it's not even fully embedded into WordPress yet. So this is actually pretty exciting,

In terms of how we can create these open ecosystems that kind of feed back to each other, it's not just code and CSS and everything. It's actually going to be everything that you can put on your site. If you are a photographer or musician or anything like that, and you'd like to contribute to this, we have the Photo Directory on WordPress.org now that you can put Creative Commons 0 or GPL-licensed images on. 

And the nice thing about this is if you just upload it to your site and tag it with this Creative Commons license, it will go into the Openverse automatically and then be accessible for other people to use. 

So that is something that - when you upload to WordPress, you can tag things and then that goes into Openverse - that is something we're gonna be working on this year as well. Because think of the power of that, when you have tens of millions of websites and creators now being part of this ecosystem, both to consume it and to create it.

Let's talk about some of the other features that are coming - that we did in `22 and that will be coming up in `23. One of the big pushes that we had for WordPress this year was all about customization and empowering designers, and people who want to be designers. 

There were three major releases this year that brought a number of cool design tools that can be done entirely on the front end with blocks. So you no longer need to go into the PHP or the CSS as much as before. 

Here's kind of top three things that have shipped this year that I feel like are really changing how WordPress can be used, and who can use it. 

1.
The first is block themes. So block themes are - remember, I've been talking a lot about Gutenberg blocks. Think of a Gutenberg block kind of like a Lego. 

It's a reusable pattern. It could be a contact form. It could be an image. It could be a video. It could be a Google Map. It could be almost anything that are the components that make up every single web page. 

The cool thing is, as you start to use blocks, you can now visit almost any website in the world, you squint a little and you can see essentially what the building patterns are that they've used to create that. Then once you start to learn WordPress blocks, then you can recreate almost any design or site that you see, use that as inspiration to make your
own version and then move on from that. 

What block theme are, are basically - traditionally WordPress themes have always been sort of PHP, CSS bundles of things. Now you can create themes just using blocks. So without knowing a lick of code, you can now, in the Gutenberg Editor inside WordPress, create these patterns and themes. 

We've also launched styles and style variations, which one of the cool things about Gutenberg is all the controls it gives you for the typography, the colors, everything. This makes it a little tricky, because historically, themes have been bundles of not just the design, but also the fonts, the colors, the spacing, everything like that. With style variations - and I'm going to show one of these soon - you can now have essentially dozens and dozens of variations on the same underlying theme structure. 

So, a theme structure could be like how archive pages are shown, what's shown on the homepage, things like that. That's all still customizable. But now the style variations can be distributed, and shown. This is, by the way this is Bea Fialho, who is going to introduce the Twenty Twenty-Three theme. 

Every year we introduce a new theme for WordPress, and this is what is coming now.

This is Twenty Twenty-Three, a new kind of default theme. Twenty Twenty-Three is designed to take advantage of the new design tools introduced in WordPress 6.1. After its highly
opinionated predecessor, Twenty Twenty-Two the upcoming default theme is a clean blank canvas that bundles with ten very distinct style variations. 

The theme uses fluid typography and spacing presets, which means your website will be automatically responsive. What makes Twenty Twenty-Three so special is that its style variations were created by members of the WordPress community, carefully selected for as many unique designs as possible. 

Whether you want to build a complex or very simple website, you can dive into creation and full customization yourself. Or you can do it quickly and intuitively through two bundled styles. Styles can change many areas of your site, from typography to spacing to how featured images look.

Here's how you can browse the different styles in Twenty Twenty-Three. Go to Appearance > Editor.

Click in the Styles icon in the top toolbar. Then click Browse styles. Then preview the different styles in your site and see your own content. Now you can also browse through each theme style variations in the Theme Directory and preview them instantly. 

Twenty Twenty-Three is accessibility ready and available with WordPress 6.1. I thought that was so relaxing. Well, I get a little excited up here sometimes.

We also have a lot to get through. So, I apologize, if I'm - we can slow this down on the YouTube later. So that is closing out and the exciting thing with the 6.1 release and the 6.2 release, which is going to be coming in March, we are at the end of phase two of Gutenberg. 

I remember when we first introduced Gutenberg six years ago. Five years ago? Yeah. We've talked about the four phases Gutenberg. The first phase was basically everything inside the box. 

So replacing that post editor and page editor with these richer Gutenberg block tools.

Phase two is when we went out outside the box and now, I've said, using these Gutenberg design tools, you can customize your headers, your footers, your archives. Basically create the entire website, using the same blocks that you learned before. 

Let's talk about the last bit of phase two and then I'm going to briefly mention phase threeses and four. Threeses? Three? 

This is a speed run. It takes about 55 seconds, but it's sped up like three times of an entire theme being created just with the Gutenberg blocks. So again, watch how this starts from like a completely blank canvas. And very quickly, using color tools, primary colors, secondary colors. We're going to have some palettes, the typography is changing, we just changed the fonts. Some spacing that's going on here. And this is going to be fully responsive. 

So we'll see that go through as well. Add some blocks. And, this is finally like changing some of the spacing to make it like a little bit cooler. That on the right is actually the navigation. So that's the menu where it says Work, Studies, Bio. Finally, editing the permalink pages. And done. That was it.

So that went from blank to theme. And this is using a new theme for WordPress. It might be one of the last themes for WordPress called the Create Block Theme.

The Create Block Theme basically gives - if you're making something brand new - like a blank canvas to start from, also with some cool features. So, for example, if you're using Google Fonts, it can actually import those to be served locally from your site. 

So, I know there's concerns in Europe and other places around GDPR. And we're using Google-hosted resources for things. So this allows you to run it all from your own website, yet still have the rich typography and other things that we all want in a modern web design. So it can have one theme, one pattern, but infinite permutations. 

These are some examples of different styles applied to just one thing. And then finally, as part of phase two, we've been working on the Editor still quite a bit. So this shows some improvements with the writing experience, including partial selection of text across different blocks. We can do multi blocks, quick link shortcuts and sort of a Zen mode. You know, Gutenberg has a lot of controls going on. 

So if you're a writer - we actually have some amazing writers here in the audience. Seth Godin. We might have Hugh Howey here someplace. You want a more distraction free interface when you're sort of doing that act of writing and creation. That's so beautiful. 

So now with the Zen mode, we've gotten quite good at hiding all that other stuff. It can essentially transform into like a very, very minimalist editor. Patterns are one of the coolest introductions to WordPress. 

So we're continuing to work on the sort of inserter and browser experience for patterns. So think of patterns - a block is like a very basic, like I said, a lego. A pattern is kind of like a little put together spaceship or something, just inserted into your sites. 

This is actually showing a brand new inserter, which combines blocks, again the basic things patterns, which are combinations, and media, all in one. What's fun about this particular pattern that we're showing you is a feedback we've heard a lot from people building sites for clients and things. 

Designers want to make these rich layouts and everything. And then when they pass it over to the client they don't want them to break it. I see some laughs from some people. So what this is actually showing is this pattern is locked in. So the placement of the images and the text and everything. So it's easy to edit the parts that you're supposed to edit. But everything else is impossible to break. 

If you try to put another image it'll be like, "Nope." You can do that in a new block or a new pattern but this particular one is locked in. So I think it'd be extremely powerful for anyone who's building WordPress sites and passing them off to others. Which is a huge part of the community. Finally when the styles - we're now adding a style book. So basically, this is a fun little display. 

If you're editing the styles for your site that shows every, basically, every possible block you can use: pull quotes, block quotes, list, everything like that. So in one place, you can kind of test out the styles or CSS that you're doing with all the different things that people can do with the Block Editor. Again, very, very exciting for improving the robustness and the edge case dealing with people developing distributed themes and patterns. 

In 2022, all the things you've just seen were contributed by a record number of folks helping out. 1399, release contributors. We were so close. Hopefully some, one person watching this will be inspired and get us to 1400 next year. This includes 652 first time contributors, people who have never contributed to WordPress ever before. 424 that contributed in `21 came back in `22. 

And one that I'm pretty excited about, which is 322 people who took a break in 2021 and then returned in 2022. Last year, one of the things I spoke about was some of our contribution numbers. Meetups, WordPresses, WordCamps everything had collapsed actually. 

And what happened was like the pandemic, everything, we lost a lot of our methods for getting people involved.

I think also people were just burnt out. What a tough couple of years we've been through. Including this year. It was a little roller coaster for me personally.

But now coming out the other side of it. People are starting to get involved. They're looking for community again. They're looking to learn. They're looking to everything. And being part of WordPress is certainly one of the things I've always returned to. If I'm ever feeling low or having a tough week, I find that the WordPress community is one of the just friendliest, lovinglest. Lovinglylest. Lovinglilest? Most Loving? There we go. And so willing to help you out.

As we were just demonstrated right there. Thank you, Michelle. We have some new core committers this year. So I want to especially recognize and celebrate Bernie Reiter, Marius Jensen, Adam Zielinski, and George Mamadashvili who are the new core committers to WordPress. 

The core committers are basically the like top editors of WordPress, these are the folks who determine - anyone can contribute code. But these are like the core folks that say what goes into the thing that gets distributed to tens of millions of websites in every release. Think of these like the Wikipedia super editors. They're like the very top of the top. 

So from the bottom of my heart to the top of my lungs, I want to say thank you to all of you. The few of us are here in this room, but also the countless thousands that comes together. Like I said, an Amish barn raising of software for WordPressers. So, thank you.

WordPress is what it is because of community. And we've talked a lot about building community through events. But it's also the WordCamp organizers, the Meetup organizers, core committers, but also especially the extender community.

It's not that hard to copy some of the features of WordPress. But when you start to think about the over 55,000, plugins and themes that can turn and transform WordPress into almost anything you imagine. Whether that's an e-commerce site, whether it's a social network, whether it's anything out there. Forums. 

The contributions, these extensions of WordPress, are really one of the things that even companies with billions of dollars of funding and thousands of employees aren't able to replicate. WordPress as a project has got a complex interconnected infrastructure that makes contributions possible. So if you ask Josepha or anyone else, what's part of the community health? It's, you know, make.wordpress.org. It's Learn. It's the forums. It's the Meetups. It's this whole sort of ecosystem around WordPress that makes up the engine of contributions.

Now, part of what we focused a lot the end of this year, and going forward and working on, is giving those tools to every theme, every plugin in the directory. So WordPress.org hosts an open directory. Think of it almost like an app store for WordPress, which you know, takes no payment cuts, has no listing fees. It's completely like open source. 

Things can be commercial, they can be non-commercial. It allows anything. And that's, of course, embedded within every WP admin, every Dashboard of WordPress who people, just with a few clicks, can install anything, or uninstall things. So I like to think of the nature of our community as fractal, meaning that every layer of WordPress, whether it's a single plugin or the entire thing, there's often sub-communities. 

If you think of a project like Yoast or WooCommerce or something like that, they often have their own plugins, sometimes hundreds of thousands of plugins, and hundreds of contributors and other things that come together to create them. 

So last year, we did a lot of work on translations, so allowing any plugin to be translated by the community. Or two years ago. And that started to come really well. Now, most of our top 100 plugins are available in many more languages than they were in the past. And we're now adding some things to - essentially one of the challenges that I've heard from a lot of WordPress users around the world is this idea that because there's such a diversity of things in the directory, how can you kind of tell what you're getting into when you choose a plugin or a theme? 

So one of the new taxonomies that we're going to be introducing to the Plugin and Themes Directory is basically going to allow the creators of that plugin or theme to self-identify for kind of what type of project they are. So what's this going to mean? 

In this new taxonomy, by default, you can say like this is kind of a solo, single player plugin. I'm just making it for myself. I'm releasing it for others. But it's it's not really meant to be anything more. 

There'll be a second taxonomy, which is a community plugin. A community plugin is one that says this belongs to all of us. The lead developer or whoever's working on it is really stewarding it. And if they're done, they'll pass it on to others.

Is this for the next generation as well? Much like WordPress itself, it's explicitly saying that there's no upsells. So this is just entirely free, often running entirely on the WP admin. So, they might call external services but also this is saying like, this is something that you can use and it's built by and for the community. And also, inviting contributions. 

So a community plugin is also saying like, please get involved. And especially if someone's wanting to get more involved in contributing to WordPress, but contributing to the core software might be a little intimidating, getting involved with these community plugins is a fun way to do it. 

A portion of the community plugins, we're going to specify as canonical plugins. What's a canonical plugin? Basically a community plugin that the WordPress project itself is saying like this is so important or so key that we're going to give our official imprint to this. 

Canonical plugins will be powered by our security and bug bounty program. They will get attention from core developers, and we're saying like this is almost blessed. This is one that's really - so as an example of a canonical plugin, think of Gutenberg itself, which is available as a plugin as well. 

If you want to get the latest and greatest features that have launched from the stuff I showed today, you can install the Gutenberg plugin. Think of the importers for WordPress, or the WordPress Importer, but also importers from other systems. Those will be canonical plugins. 

So basically saying where you can install this and you're super, super sure it is 100%, solid, secure, and supported by the core WordPress. 

And then finally, we want to recognize as well that there's a ton of commercial plugins. And so that's going to be something that people can tag. 

Often a commercial plugin will be accepting of outside contributions, but there's often a company behind it. They often have commercial support, and some sort of upsell. We've probably all experienced a theme or plugin that you can use for free, but then there's some pro version. So all of those will be tagged commercial. 

And so, if you're choosing something, browsing the directory or going in, you'll now be able to tell sort of what you're getting into. And the beautiful thing about WordPress is we love all of them. Not one is better than the other. They're just different. And we want to create a space where there could be commercial, non-commercial, community, everything mixed together. 

So this is launching this month on the WordPress.org plugin directory. So look for this. And then we're going to build it into the sort of built-in WP admin browser as well. So check that out. 

Just curious, who has something commercial that's in the directory that's in the room? Here, we got like a dozen people. Anyone working on a community plugin? Or what's going to be called a community plugin? It's more than that actually, we've got a ton of Gutenberg people here. That's probably most of the room. 

Have a canonical plugin? Anyone working on one of those? Gutenberg? Yeah. Cool. This now sort of summarizes all the things have happened. 

I now want to speak about phase three of Gutenberg. Three of four that we'll now be heading into after the 6.2 release. 

So again, phase one, post editing. 
Phase two, editing your entire site. 

What phase three is basically taking WordPress, which is kind of a single player thing and making it multiplayer. So the features that are going to be coming in phase three - some of which are in experimental right now and some of which will be starting this year. 

So if any of this piques your interest, it's a perfect time to get involved with what's going to be the next generation of Gutenberg and WordPress: real time collaboration. So if you've ever used Google Docs or anything like that, you'll now be able to see other people editing the blocks, posts, the pages and work on it together. 

Part of this is also introducing a synchronous collaboration and editorial workflows. So, think now, if you've ever wanted to share a draft of a web page or a theme or anything like that, inside WordPress, you'll now be able to have a special invite or someone else can come in and work in real time, if you want. You can see what each other are doing or comment on specific things. Maybe there's a paragraph of your new post. 

Now you can put a note on it and say, "Hey, I think that this could be XYZ." That now collaboration is going to be built into WordPress. You don't need to like go to Google Docs or anything else to do that. It's all kind of built-in which also means all the blog editing tools will be there. 

WordPress for, I think, over 15 years now has a really cool hidden feature. On my favorites actually. Which is called Post Revisions. So this means every single edit of every single post and page is saved by default on the good hosts forever. Some hosts limit this. 

I hope they stop limiting this once we get some better features in but this now much like a Wikipedia you can see the history of everything. This is great for just regular people. 

Oh, I love like going back and seeing like how maybe my About page has evolved over time. But also amazing like, if you say you're a financial institution or a pharmaceutical company where everything you have on the website has like legal liability, and you need to see exactly what changed when. So, revisions has always been there. 

But we're going to be significantly improving the interface for editing revisions. 

And then finally, the Media Library. So we're going to be doing a lot with the Media Library to integrate the Openverse directory that we spoke about, both contributing to Openverse and getting from Openverse.

And just finally, like, creating like a notifications infrastructure. So everything that I just spoke about for these editorial flows will be there. So that is a brief summary of phase three. 

Phase four, which I know you're going to ask when it's coming - still years away - is when we take everything we just spoke about on WordPress and make it multilingual. 

And so WordPress is so international, used in so many countries where there's more than one primary language. Every time I give a talk, the question is, when is WordPress going -
when is multilingual going to be built into core? 

Because there's some fantastic plugins for it, but since it's not built into core, it can still be challenging. 

Now we're doing multilingual after phase three because all the workflow stuff I just spoke about is, I think, going to be really crucial for creating great workflows around the translations. 

Because think about it, you make a new page in one language. Maybe you're writing your website in French. It's going to be translated into Swiss German. What's the workflow for knowing that something is updated on the page? The translators get notified, and then they sort of sync whatever the update is. Or that you might maybe want to ship a few things at the same time. So you don't want to ship the French version until the Swiss German version is ready, for example. 

So all of that is going to be supported by the collaboration. So it's phase three and phase four of Gutenberg coming soon.

Part of what makes WordPress have the sort of success we've had so far is the responsiveness and feedback that we get from the community both in the questions, like I talked about, at every single - it's been hammered in my brain multilingual is important - because they'll ask about it every time. But also we do this annual survey. It's like kind of a census for WordPress. 

This is going to be on WordPress.org but you can also scan this QR code. This is like our census. So if you want to give an input, we've reduced this from 100 questions down to 20. So I know there was a lot of work for that. 

It's fast, easy, and we want to get as many folks from around the WordPress community participating this because one thing we do have to struggle with is the folks in this room or that develop WordPress, are just one slice of the user base of WordPress.

There's millions and millions and millions of people who might not be represented in the conversations. So we get this survey out to some percentage of them. We'll get to know a little bit of what we might not know we don't know in the wider usage of WordPress. 

As we close up, it's been a really, really exciting year to be in technology. There has been moments this year that something has been released where I was so my mind was so blown. I just posted to my blog that quote - was it from? What's the movie? "They should have sent a poet"? 

Which one was that? It's one of these cool sci-fi movies. The aliens come in and like - Contact! Yes, thank you. 

Well, one of the things that blew my mind this year and if you haven't tried it out, you gotta check it out from OpenAI is ChatGPT. So this is taking the GPT transformer large language model and applying it to this like chat bot. 

We decided to ask it to actually write a short scene in which Matt, the founder of WordPress - co-founder, it should say describes Full Site Editing in a single word. 

Matt, the founder of WordPress, stood on a stage in front of a large crowd of eager developers. He smiled confidently and said, "Full Site Editing, in a single word? Transformative.

The crowd erupted in applause as Matt walked off the stage. Which I won't do. 

So that was the prompt, and that was the answer that ChatGPT gave. I promise the entire speech wasn't written by it, although we did think about it. Apart from tools like this, which are so exciting - again, please try this out. It's free and open right now. chat.openai.com I think, is the way to check it out. 

What's also been amazing some of the creative creative tools. So OpenAI released a tool called DALL-E. I think it's called that DALL-E 2. D A L L - E which is image creating. One of the things that blew my mind is the - oh nevermind - was this actually being open source. 

So OpenAI is kind of like the new Bell Labs. It's an incredible - like the top researchers in the world, everything. 

There's a group called Stability AI that has released tools like Stable Diffusion, which have basically taken all the stuff that OpenAI is doing, and you can run it on your laptop. You can run within like 20 or 30 seconds, give it a prompt. 

I'm not sure what this prompt was. It looks kind of colorful jazz. But you can do things like you can upload a photo to it, and say, give me this photo in the style of Monet, or in the style of Salvador Dalí, or different things like that. 

It can transform images. It can take existing things, and you can edit it. So instead of using Photoshop, you could just say, remove the clouds in the background, or add more saxophones. You can kind of just tell it what to do. And it's incredible. If you haven't done this, it is kind of mind blowing. 

This has also caused, I feel, like a lot of soul searching for everyone. Because it's like this is an area - you know, the development of AI, we were told like five or six years ago, we were six months from like self driving cars. And I think we're still six months away. 

So that ended up being a lot harder to do for understandable reasons. But if you told me like illustrations and designs and writing State of the Word speeches was something that the AI was going to be able to do, I thought that would have been 10 or 20 years away. 

And it turns out, it's there already. 

Now, part of the reason this works is that when you give a prompt to one of these things, it'll actually make like four, six, ten different images of which, like, two are ridiculous and some of them are okay. 

And but there's often a few in there that like you're like, wow, that's exactly what I imagined. And as a human, you can choose that and take it and then iterate based on that. Or maybe use that as a kicking off point for your own modification, inspiration, or creation. 

The sort of use of this creative tools combined with humans, reminded me of one of my favorite Pablo Picasso quotes. He says "Computers are useless, they can only give you answers." 

Part of why I like this is that as you start to play with these tools, the prompts that you give it has such a huge impact on it. So using tricks like we did on the ChatGPT prompt that said, you know, write a scene in a movie or in a play. 

You can give it conversations you can - it essentially sort of becomes a co-creation tool and the creativity that you have in prompting it and sort of starting that conversation has a huge impact on the quality of what it gives you back. 

You'll see as you start to play with this, sometimes it gives you really dumb answers. Also, ChatGPT sounds very confident and sometimes will tell you things that are completely factually inaccurate. 

It's interesting, it uses - it's a large language model. So basically, these models were developed by taking words and looking at what words are most likely to come next. It turns out there's kind of an emergent intelligence that happens when you start to get hundreds of billions of these pairs. And chat or GPT-4, which is coming out this year - if you think this stuff is amazing, I think GPT-4 is going to blow all of your minds. It is really totally next level. 

So giving the question to the computer complements what computers are doing best versus giving you the answers. And so I've added a little variation which is "Computers gives you answers, but the creativity is still in the inputs." This blew my mind. 

There's one thing in the WordPress world that also blew my mind, which is where we're going to end up with. Which we're calling Playground. I'm going to click to start this. This is going to be introduced by Adam Zielinski. And this is actually going to be available shortly after this talk. 

This WordPress website is not loaded from a server. WordPress, PHP, and a database are all running in a web browser. It's called WordPress Playground and you can customize it. 

Let's click on the Settings button and select the Pendant Theme, the CoBlocks plugin, and the Gutenberg plugin. Starting a new playground only takes a couple of seconds. And I'm even already logged in as an admin. 

Now let's create a new page using the alert block from CoBlocks. Let's give it a title and some content. And I'd like to be sure that this looks right when published, so let's preview it in a new browser tab. Hmm, that looks perfect. Let's publish it. 

Note that this website is temporary and gets erased as soon as I close my browser tab. And everything you see here is available for testing right now. 

And here's what WordPress Playground may enable in the future. Imagine a guided interactive WordPress learning experience where you get to edit code live and see the results right away.

Imagine trying WordPress plugins right in the plugin directory and even interacting with them right then and there. Finally, imagine being able to try WordPress and even contribute to it within seconds from visiting WordPress.org. 

Isn't the future exciting? You can be a part of it. Learn more at developer.wordpress.org/playground. Join the conversation on the #meta-playground Slack channel and get involved in the project.

So in classic live demo fashion, we broke it today. So but very, very soon, you'll be able to do this. I'm going to repeat what just happened. 

So normally, to use WordPress, you need to set up either like a local web server a database, or go with a web post, like web hosts like Bluehost or WordPress.com or something, and that is running server software. Again, like a web server like Apache, a full database, PHP itself. All these things. 

This is happening 100% In the browser now. So basically, it's a virtual machine that gets spun up using this new thing called WebAssembly. That's built into all modern browsers now. And it creates a database, a PHP, your web server everything, just right there in a little window. This is wild. 

Like he said, This could be used for web development, for trying out a plugin before you would install it. I think we're just at the very earliest stages of what this means.

Like for example, imagining a staging site. So maybe built into WordPress, instead of having to spin up a whole new web server and virtual machine to test out things, you would just click a button. It clones your existing WordPress, downloads it to your browser, and then you can make any changes you want. When you're done, deploy it back to your live website. 

All of this stuff used to require a ton of server side magic and sort of bouncing things around. And now the miracles of modern technology, you could do it all inside your browser. So check out Playgrounds, coming soon as in today. 

And if you're a developer, like you realize how incredible what we just saw is. It's like - when I first saw it, I was like, this is not possible. What just happened? So yeah, thank you, Adam. And congratulations to everyone who's been working on that.

So that is 2022. Don't you like this, we get a little heart on the 22. Thank you all.
None of this would be possible without the contributions. It doesn't just take a village with WordPress, it takes basically like cities and small countries of people coming together. And that's what we plan to keep doing. 

So as we have had two decades of WordPress, so far, I like to think a lot about how can we make WordPress something that is a gift to the world and part of the web infrastructure for decades to come. I hope that maybe 100 years from now, maybe in this spot in New York, there'll be someone else giving a State of the Word. 

And this will be something that like I said, I feel like the contributors to WordPress, myself included, all the volunteers, WordPress belongs to us. It belongs to all of us. But really, we're just taking care of it for the next generation. So really thinking about how to build things long term, how to align incentives, how to create the community tools, that last for a long, long time. So thank you so much for being part of that.